Peaking too early in an election campaign is to be avoided, at all costs. It is the point of time in the campaign when you want the electors to go cast their vote because there are no additional voters for your campaign to win and you can only lose votes from then on. It is because of this downhill slope that candidates go into serious denial if it becomes known that their campaign has peaked too early. What frustrates politicians is that they really have very little control of the peaking of the campaign.
The current election in Babel is an excellent case study in peaking. The front-runner in the Babel mayoral race, a former Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP), has already had his peaking. It happened about four weeks ago. The reason for this is that despite being a quite unfriendly person, he has the best name recognition among the mayoral candidates. He represented Babel and the surrounding area in the Ontario Legislature until defeated three years ago. He was defeated in that election for a number of good reasons but one of the reasons is that he never kisses babies, does not have many campaign workers nor does he seem to like making campaign appearances. His campaign strategy relies on signs, literature distribution and a multitude of telephone calls, some by humans.
His major campaign promise is that, if he is mayor, he will allow no property tax increases. This promise appeals to the people who are among the P-Oed voters. These are the voters who are annoyed about something, dislike paying any property taxes, are frustrated because they do not understand city hall and want to get even. They would know in the first year, when their property taxes go up, that the candidate lied to them. It is his fault anyway because he agreed with his leader Mike Harris who, as premier, put through a law that said municipalities cannot run an operating deficit. Mr. Harris also dumped welfare costs on municipalities. The, then, MPP voted ‘aye’ and municipalities in Ontario lost control of their spending.
And that is why, his mayoral hopes are on the slippery slope downhill at this time. In the past four weeks, he has been steadily losing support. Two factors contribute to this. As more and more voters make up their minds by checking out the candidates, they move to the decided category and the thinking voter does not like the former MPP. The fact that the second place candidate is constantly moving up in the polls while the front runner goes down means that election day would have to be tomorrow for him to win. He cannot afford to lose many more votes.
The only factor that helps him is that there is a large field of candidates for the mayoralty. Three of the candidates will collectively garner less than three per cent of the votes. They are the also-rans who show what a free country we are by letting anyone waste money trying to win political office. There would be more respect for these people if they set their sights on a lower level job than mayor, their first time out.
That leaves the incumbent mayor, a former mayor and two incumbent councillors in the race with the former MPP. The incumbent mayor peaked four years ago and has not endeared himself to the voters during his term of office. It is predicted that he will get less than 3000 votes when all the votes are counted on October 25.
The former mayor who is earnestly seeking redemption has never really got his campaign off the ground. He is personable and hard working and will probably win up to 5500 votes, which is not a bad showing.
The wild card in the campaign is the Ward 1 councillor. This person jumped into the campaign late and lacks organization, fund-raising and a serious rationale for his campaign. What many people will look for is his audited financial report after the election to find out who is paying for his campaign. He is losing ground rapidly with every all candidate forum he attends. The bad news is that while his campaign is going downhill with the former MPP, he could collect as many as 6000 votes.
The other problem for the candidates is that usually less than a third of the potential voters in Babel bother to vote in municipal elections. A somewhat higher turnout is expected with this election but that leaves the first and second place contenders splitting around 21000 votes. One of these two contenders is going to win the election with a margin of probably less than 500 votes.
If there was ever an argument for runoff elections in Canada, this one makes the case.
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